Housing and Planning Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, they would. But the principle behind the Government’s initiative is that within a few years people can start to move up the property ladder, but we want to help them to move on rather more quickly than the noble Lord suggests.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I am puzzled by what the Minister is saying. There are hundreds of thousands of young people who have had to buy a small flat early in their lives, at the point when they need to have housing. Very often they have got married and they may have a baby. They then have a second child. They make some savings and move to something larger. They do not have big discounts. So why is the Minister saying that this very small group of people should have such a very large sum of money thrown at them? It really is very difficult to understand.

The Minister has said throughout this debate that she is concerned that other forms of housing and tenure should all be provided with support as well, yet everything she says in response to this debate suggests that starter homes have become of such enormous significance to the Government’s policy that very large sums of money are being promoted to be provided for a relatively small group of people who will, very often, not be the really poor or even middle-income young people but relatively well-off young people. I cannot understand why the Minister thinks that, when it comes to wanting to move to a larger house, this group is not capable of doing what everybody that has been in this group before without a starter home benefit has been able to do. It just does not add up. It is also incredibly inequitable. In fact, the whole scheme is incredibly inequitable. I would have thought that the Government would want to look at the distributional consequences of a scheme of this sort: not just the costs and benefits, as was suggested earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, but who benefits and who does not benefit. The Committee deserves to know something about this, and we have not been told.

At face value, it looks to me as if a large number of people, including young people who want to buy homes, are going to get nothing out of this while a very small number are going to get a great deal and will continue to get a great deal. The Government and the Minister refuse to see that a perpetuity provision such as that proposed in this group of amendments would help to counter some of the criticisms that Members of the Committee have given in the debate this afternoon.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, the noble Baroness asks who will benefit. Young people will benefit, and history shows us that it is young people for whom home ownership has been out of reach.